Always Use Docker Image Digests

Docker image digests are unique, immutable identifiers for container images. This means that two images with different contents will have different digests, even if they have the same name and tag. When you pull an image by its digest, you are guaranteed to get the exact same image every time, regardless of when or by … Continue reading Always Use Docker Image Digests →

Creating SBOMs with the Snyk CLI

The Snyk CLI is a great tool used to scan a project and report vulnerabilities discovered in it. The Snyk CLI supports a wide variety of languages and build systems, making it ideal as a generic, go-to solution for vulnerability reporting. However, it only outputs vulnerabilities discovered – it does not generate an SBOM, which … Continue reading Creating SBOMs with the Snyk CLI →

Improving the Reproducibility of Spring Boot’s Docker Image Builder

Reproducible builds are big wins for security, maintainability, and sanity. If you don’t like it when nothing has changed, yet your build suddenly breaks or doesn’t produce the same output, then improving reproducibility is for you. By default, Spring Boot’s Docker/OCI image building solutions, bootBuildImage (in Gradle) and spring-boot:build-image (in Maven), do not operate reproducibly. … Continue reading Improving the Reproducibility of Spring Boot’s Docker Image Builder →

Crafting Effective Announcements

The only constant in life is change. Heraclitus In this world of omnipresent change, effective communication is key to survival. Information that will impact others must be shared, and how that sharing is done will be the difference between success and failure. Will recipients of your message be confused, or will the message be clear? … Continue reading Crafting Effective Announcements →

Identifying, Reporting, and Fixing CVE-2021-22119: DoS Vulnerability in Spring Security OAuth 2.0

In March 2021, I observed troubling behavior in multiple applications I supported that are built using Spring Boot: they would occasionally stop responding. Eventually, I tracked down the root cause to a DoS (Denial of Service) vulnerability in Spring Security OAuth 2.0: a simple shell script could take down any affected web application. Respecting the … Continue reading Identifying, Reporting, and Fixing CVE-2021-22119: DoS Vulnerability in Spring Security OAuth 2.0 →

Users and Client Secrets in Keycloak Realm Exports

Keycloak is an open source Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution that’s easy to run in Docker using a Configuration as Code (CAC) strategy enabling a workflow where a git source control repository can be cloned by a developer who can run one non-interactive script that starts Keycloak and gets it into a consistent state … Continue reading Users and Client Secrets in Keycloak Realm Exports →

Contributing Improved Security to JavaMelody with Content Security Policy

JavaMelody is a web based monitoring tool frequently run in production environments, providing insights including CPU usage, hot spots in code, database connection pool utilization, and more. I’m always on the lookout for ways to improve security, so when a security scan pointed out that the JavaMelody web interface didn’t have a Content Security Policy … Continue reading Contributing Improved Security to JavaMelody with Content Security Policy →

Reproducible Builds in Java

Reproducible builds are a set of software development practices that create an independently-verifiable path from source to binary code. https://reproducible-builds.org/ Reproducible builds are important and provide benefits in many areas, including: Security. Because the same input source code always provides the same output binary artifact, you know that no attacker modified the toolchain to inject vulnerabilities … Continue reading Reproducible Builds in Java →

Linters: Keys To Secure, Maintainable, Quality DevSecOps

Linters are static analysis tools that analyze source code and report problems. The term goes all the way back to Bell Labs in 1978 but the concept is still very important today. In my opinion, linters are a key ingredient of a successful DevSecOps implementation, and yet not enough people are aware of linters, how … Continue reading Linters: Keys To Secure, Maintainable, Quality DevSecOps →